Researchers' participation in and motivations for engaging with research information management systems

This article examined how researchers participated in research information management systems (RIMSs), their motivations for participation, and their priorities for those motivations. Profile maintenance, question-answering, and endorsement activities were used to define three cumulatively increasing levels of participation: Readers, Record Managers, and Community Members. Junior researchers were more engaged in RIMSs than were senior researchers. Postdocs had significantly higher odds of endorsing other researchers for skills and being categorized as Community Members than did full and associate professors. Assistant professors were significantly more likely to be Record Managers than were members of any other seniority categories. Finally, researchers from the life sciences showed a significantly higher propensity for being Community Members than Readers and Record Managers when compared with researchers from engineering and the physical sciences, respectively.

When performing activities, researchers were motivated by the desire to share scholarship, feel competent, experience a sense of enjoyment, improve their status, and build ties with other members of the community. Moreover, when researchers performed activities that directly benefited other members of a RIMS, they assigned higher priorities to intrinsic motivations, such as perceived self-efficacy, enjoyment, and building community ties. Researchers at different stages of their academic careers and disciplines ranked some of the motivations for engaging with RIMSs differently. The general model of research participation in RIMSs; the relationships among RIMS activities; the motivation scales for activities; and the activity, seniority, and discipline-specific priorities for the motivations developed by this study provide the foundation for a framework for researcher participation in RIMSs. This framework can be used by RIMSs and institutional repositories to develop tools and design mechanisms to increase researchers' engagement in RIMSs.